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Pablo Picasso facts for kids

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker , ceramicist and theatre designer. He was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century and is known for co-founding the Cubist movement.

Blue Period: 1901–1904

Rose period: 1904–1906, african art and primitivism: 1907–1909, analytic cubism: 1909–1912, synthetic cubism: 1912–1919, neoclassicism and surrealism: 1919–1929, before the second world war, during the second world war, personal life, interesting facts about pablo picasso.

Picasso was born at 23:15 on 25 October 1881, in the city of Málaga , Andalusia , in southern Spain. He was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco (1838–1913) and María Picasso y López. Picasso's family was of middle-class background. His father was a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life, Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. Ruiz's ancestors were minor aristocrats.

Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was a traditional academic artist and instructor, who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models.

The family moved to A Coruña in 1891, where his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. They stayed almost four years. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Ruiz felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had surpassed him.

In 1895, Picasso was traumatized when his seven-year-old sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria . After her death, the family moved to Barcelona , where Ruiz took a position at its School of Fine Arts.

Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, and the jury admitted him, at just 13. As a student, Picasso lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented a small room for him close to home so he could work alone, yet he checked up on him numerous times a day, judging his drawings. The two argued frequently.

Picasso's father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando , the country's best art school. At age 16, Picasso left home. He stopped attending classes soon after enrollment, because he did not like formal training. Instead, he spent time in the Prado , studying paintings by Diego Velázquez , Francisco Goya , and Francisco Zurbarán . Picasso especially admired the works of El Greco ; elements such as his elongated limbs, arresting colours, and mystical visages are echoed in Picasso's later work.

Picasso's work is often categorized into periods. The most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919). Much of Picasso's work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style, and his work in the mid-1920s often has characteristics of Surrealism . His later work often combines elements of his earlier styles.

Picasso's Blue Period (1901–1904) began either in Spain in early 1901 or in Paris in the second half of the year. It called so as he mostly used shades of blue and blue-green for his paintings.

The Rose Period (1904–1906) is characterised by utilising orange and pink colours and featuring many circus people, acrobats and harlequins.

By 1905, Picasso became a favourite of American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. Their older brother Michael Stein and his wife Sarah also became collectors of his work.

Picasso's African-influenced Period (1907–1909) begins with his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon . When he displayed the painting to acquaintances in his studio later that year, the nearly universal reaction was shock and revulsion; Matisse angrily dismissed the work as a hoax. Picasso did not exhibit Les Demoiselles publicly until 1916.

Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period that follows.

Analytic cubism (1909–1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed with Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colours. Both artists took apart objects and "analyzed" them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and Braque's paintings at this time share many similarities.

Synthetic cubism (1912–1919) was a further development of the genre of cubism, in which cut paper fragments – often wallpaper or portions of newspaper pages – were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art.

Between 1915 and 1917, Picasso began a series of paintings depicting highly geometric and minimalist Cubist objects, consisting of either a pipe, a guitar or a glass, with an occasional element of collage.

1909, Femme assise (Sitzende Frau) , oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm (39 x 31 in), Staatliche Museen, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

1909–10, Figure dans un Fauteuil (Seated Nude, Femme nue assise) , oil on canvas, 92.1 × 73 cm (36 x 28 in), Tate Modern , London. This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921

1910, Woman with Mustard Pot (La Femme au pot de moutarde) , oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm (28 x 23 in), Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. Exhibited at the Armory Show, New York, Chicago, Boston 1913

1910, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler , The Art Institute of Chicago . Picasso wrote of Kahnweiler "What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn't had a business sense?"

1910–11, Guitariste, La mandoliniste (Woman playing guitar or mandolin) , oil on canvas

c.1911, Le Guitariste . Reproduced in Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du "Cubisme" , 1912

1911, Still Life with a Bottle of Rum , oil on canvas, 61.3 × 50.5 cm (24 x 19 in), Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York

1911, The Poet (Le poète) , oil on linen, 131.2 × 89.5 cm (51 5/8 × 35 1/4 in), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

1911–12, Violon (Violin) , oil on canvas, 100 × 73 cm (39 x 28 in) (oval), Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands. This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921

1913, Bouteille, clarinet, violon, journal, verre , 55 × 45 cm (21 x 17 in). This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921

1913, Femme assise dans un fauteuil (Eva), Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair , oil on canvas, 149.9 × 99.4 cm (59 x 39 in), Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art

1913–14, Head (Tête) , cut and pasted coloured paper, gouache and charcoal on paperboard, 43.5 × 33 cm (17 x 12.9 in), Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

1913–14, L'Homme aux cartes (Card Player) , oil on canvas, 108 × 89.5 cm (42 x 35 in), Museum of Modern Art , New York

1914–15, Nature morte au compotier (Still Life with Compote and Glass) , oil on canvas, 63.5 × 78.7 cm (25 × 31 in), Columbus Museum of Art , Ohio

1916, L'anis del mono (Bottle of Anis del Mono) , oil on canvas, 46 × 54.6 cm (18 x 21 in), Detroit Institute of Arts , Michigan

Parade , 1917, curtain designed for the ballet Parade . The work is the largest of Picasso's paintings. Centre Pompidou-Metz , Metz , France, May 2012

In February 1917, Picasso made his first trip to Italy. In the period Picasso produced work in a neoclassical style. Picasso's paintings and drawings from this period frequently recall the work of Raphael and Ingres .

Pablo Picasso, 1918, Pierrot , oil on canvas, 92.7 × 73 cm, Museum of Modern Art , New York

Pablo Picasso, 1918, Portrait d'Olga dans un fauteuil (Olga in an Armchair) , Musée Picasso , Paris, France

In 1925, he took part in the first Surrealist exhibition in Paris. Between 1924 and 1926, Picasso preferred to paint abstract still lifes.

In 1928, he started a new period. He began to make sculptural works.

In 1936, Picasso got a job as director of the Prado-Museum in Madrid . During this time, the Spanish Civil War started. German bombs fall on Guernica in Spain on 26 April 1937. Picasso used this impact to paint one of his most famous paintings, Guernica . This painting was completed in about 2 months. It was first shown in the Spanish Pavilion in Paris in 1937.

In 1938, Picasso's mother died. After the Second World War started on 1 September 1939, Picasso returned to Paris. In 1941, he wrote his first play "Le désir attrapé par la queue" ( English: Desire Caught by the Tail ). It was first shown in 1944. Also in 1944, Picasso joined the communist Party. Picasso spent almost the full war time in Paris.

Picasso was married twice and had four children by three women:

• Paulo (4 February 1921 – 5 June 1975, Paul Joseph Picasso) – with Olga Khokhlova
• Maya (5 September 1935 – 20 December 2022, Maria de la Concepcion Picasso) – with Marie-Thérèse Walter
• Claude (born 15 May 1947, Claude Pierre Pablo Picasso) – with Françoise Gilot
• Paloma (born 19 April 1949, Anne Paloma Picasso) – with Françoise Gilot

Photographer and painter Dora Maar was a constant companion of Picasso. The two were closest in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and it was Maar who documented the painting of Guernica .

Pablo Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins , France, from pulmonary edema and heart failure , while he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. He was buried at his Château of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence .

• Although Picasso was Spanish, he spent most of his adult life in France.
• At birth, he was given a very long name, combining those of various saints and relatives. The record of his baptism stated that his full name was 'Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso'.
• According to his mother, his first words were "piz, piz", a shortening of lápiz , the Spanish word for "pencil".
• Henri Matisse was Picasso's lifelong friend and rival. The two met in 1905.
• In 1944, Picasso joined the French Communist Party .
• In 1950, received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government. In 1962, he received the Lenin Peace Prize.
• As a communist, Picasso opposed the intervention of the United Nations and the United States in the Korean War .
• On 9 January 1949, Picasso created Dove , a black and white lithograph. It was used to illustrate a poster at the 1949 World Peace Council and became an iconographic image of the period, known as "The dove of peace". Picasso's image was used around the world.
• Picasso made a few film appearances, always as himself, including a cameo in Jean Cocteau 's Testament of Orpheus (1960).
• In 1955, he helped make the film Le Mystère Picasso ( The Mystery of Picasso ) directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot .
• In 1967, Picasso refused to be paid $100,000 for the Chicago Picasso , which is one of the most recognizable landmarks in downtown Chicago. He donated the money to the people of the city.
• Picasso also wrote poetry. Between 1935 and 1959 he wrote over 300 poems.
• As of 2015 [update] , Picasso remained the top-ranked artist (based on sales of his works at auctions) according to the Art Market Trends report.
• More of his paintings have been stolen than any other artist's; in 2012, the Art Loss Register had 1,147 of his works listed as stolen.
• Picasso is played by Antonio Banderas in the 2018 season of Genius which focuses on his life and art.
• The Museu Picasso in Barcelona. It features many of his early works, created while he was living in Spain, including many rarely seen works which reveal his firm grounding in classical techniques.
• The Museo Picasso Málaga opened in 2003 in his birthplace, Málaga, Spain.
• The Musée Picasso , Paris. Picasso's paintings left after his death form the core of this collection.
• This page was last modified on 17 April 2024, at 14:49. Suggest an edit .

Picasso's childhood

In every child there is an artist. The problem is to know how to remain an artist when growing up.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on October 25, 1881 in Malaga, Spain. He spent the first part of his life between Málaga and La Coruña, surrounded by his family. It was there that his passion for drawing and painting was born. What kind of little boy was Picasso? When did he start to paint?

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, the provincial capital of Andalusia, to José Ruiz Blasco and Maria Picasso. His father, nicknamed "Pepe", came from a middle-class family. He taught drawing at the Malaga School of Fine Arts and was curator of the city's municipal museum. He also sold his own paintings. He had a great influence on his son, to whom he passed on his taste for painting from a very young age. Picasso used to watch him work and they regularly went to the museum together.

Dona Maria, Picasso's mother, was a housewife and very close to her children. It was her family name that Picasso took as his artist’s name. The double S, which is not very common in Spain, indicates his Genoese origins. Pablo had two sisters, Dolores, nicknamed "Lola", born in 1884, and Conception, often called "Conchita", the youngest of the family, born in 1887.

Pablo did not like school very much, he was bored and did not concentrate. Sabartès, a friend of the artist, tells us in his book Picasso, Portraits and Memories, that the little Malagasy boy screamed every morning when the maid took him to school. In class, he spent his time drawing and cutting out figures from paper. The teacher allowed him to bring in a pigeon, which he kept sketching in the corner of the classroom. At the age of 8, Picasso painted his first oil painting. It was entitled “The Little Yellow Picador”. The child applies himself to the composition, with a desire for perspective, different characters are represented in the background, and there is a strong spontaneity of line, supported by the yellow and the details of the costume of the picador on his horse. This passion for bullfighting is probably due to Pepe, who often took Picasso to the shows, sometimes bloody. At the age of 9, his favorite themes were mainly pigeons and bullfighting scenes.

In 1891, Pepe was transferred to Coruña, on the northwestern Spanish coast, following the closure of the museum in Malaga. He took his family with him. Picasso was ten years old.

As soon as they arrived, Don José enrolled Pablo in the Instituto de la Guarda, which was located in the same building as the city's Museum of Fine Arts, but he was still not interested in the schooling.

At the age of 13, the young Picasso was confronted with a traumatic event. His sister, Conchita, fell ill and died of diphtheria at the age of 7. He recounts this episode, sixty years later, to Françoise Gilot (his companion at the time), who transcribes it in her book "Living with Picasso". Picasso explains that he wished to stop drawing if his sister was able to cope. Unfortunately for her, the wish was not fulfilled, and the ghost of this funeral promise followed the artist for the rest of his career.

Artistic production

Since 1892, Picasso was enrolled in a drawing class at the Fine Arts School in Coruña, while continuing his classical education.

He continued to improve his drawing skills and used new media such as pastels and pencils. Some themes are recurrent such as pigeons, hands, his sister Lola who remains one of his favorite models during his youth.

He made small, illustrated newspapers, "La Coruña" and "Azul y Blanco".

"The Barefoot Girl" is a painting made by Picasso when he was only 13 years old. It is the first incarnation of the theme of the "seated woman" which is declined and renewed throughout his work. That same year, 1895, Don José took his son to visit the Prado Museum in Madrid.

But his stay in Coruña was cut short, and his new destination was Barcelona! Don José was appointed professor at the city's School of Fine Arts: La Lonja.

This "childish" interlude came to an end, but Picasso always held his work from this period in high regard. "The Barefoot Girl" and "Man with a Cap", painted at the beginning of 1895, accompanied him to his living and creative places. Picasso said of them: "They still smell of La Coruña".

• World Biography

Pablo Picasso Biography

Born: October 25, 1881 Malaga, Spain Died: April 8, 1973 Mougins, France Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist

The Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Pablo Picasso was one of the most productive and revolutionary artists in the history of Western painting. As the central figure in developing cubism (an artistic style where recognizable objects are fragmented to show all sides of an object at the same time), he established the basis for abstract art (art having little or no pictorial representation).

Early years

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Malaga, Spain. He was the eldest and only son with two younger sisters, Lola and Concepción. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, was a professor in the School of Arts and Crafts. Pablo's mother was Maria Ruiz Picasso (the artist used her surname from about 1901 on). It is rumored that Picasso learned to draw before he could speak. As a child, his father frequently took him to bullfights, and one of his earlier paintings was a scene from a bullfight.

In 1891 the family moved to La Coruña, where, at the age of fourteen, Picasso began studying at the School of Fine Art. Under the academic instruction of his father, he developed his artistic talent at an extraordinary rate.

When the family moved to Barcelona, Spain, in 1896, Picasso easily gained entrance to the School of Fine Arts. A year later he was admitted as an advanced student at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Spain. He demonstrated his remarkable ability by completing in one day an entrance examination for which an entire month was permitted.

Picasso soon found the atmosphere at the academy stifling, and he returned to Barcelona, where he began to study historical and contemporary art on his own. At that time Barcelona was the most vital cultural center in Spain, and Picasso quickly joined the group of poets, painters, and writers who gathered at the famous café Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats). Between 1900 and 1903 Picasso stayed alternately in Paris, France, and Barcelona. He had his first one-man exhibition in Paris in 1901.

Paris at the turn of the twentieth century

At the turn of the twentieth century Paris was the center of the international art world. In painting it was the birthplace of the impressionists—painters who depicted the appearance of objects by means of dabs or strokes of unmixed colors in order to create the look of actual reflected light. While their works retained certain links with the visible world, they exhibited a decided tendency toward flatness and abstraction.

Picasso set up a permanent studio in Paris in 1904. His studio soon became a gathering place for the city's most modern artists, writers, and patrons.

Picasso's early work reveals a creative pattern which continued throughout his long career. Between 1900 and 1906 he worked through nearly every major style of contemporary (modern) painting. In doing so, his own work changed with extraordinary quickness.

Blue and pink periods

The years between 1901 and 1904 were known as Picasso's Blue Period. Nearly all of his works were executed in somber shades of blue and contained lean, melancholy, and introspective (concentrating on their own thoughts) figures. Two outstanding examples of this period are the Old Guitarist (1903) and Life (1903).

In the second half of 1904 Picasso's style took a new direction. In these paintings the color became more natural, delicate, and tender in its range, with reddish and pink tones dominating the works. Thus this period was called his Pink Period. The most celebrated example of this phase is the Family of Saltimbanques (1905). Picasso's work between 1900 and 1905 was generally flat, emphasizing the two-dimensional character of the painting surface. Late in 1905, however, he became increasingly interested in pictorial volume. This interest seems to have been influenced by the late paintings of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906).

The face in Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) reveals still another new interest: its mask-like abstraction was inspired by Iberian sculpture, an exhibition of which Picasso had seen at the Louvre, in Paris, in the spring of 1906. This influence reached its fullest expression a year later in one of the most revolutionary pictures of Picasso's entire career, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907).

Picasso and cubism

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is generally regarded as the first cubist painting. The faces of the figures are seen from both front and profile positions at the same time. Between 1907 and 1911 Picasso continued to break apart the visible world into increasingly small facets of monochromatic (using one color) planes of space. In doing so, his works became more and more abstract. Representation gradually vanished from his painting, until it became an end in itself—for the first time in the history of Western art.

The growth of this process is evident in all of Picasso's work between 1907 and 1911. Some of the most outstanding pictorial examples of the development are Fruit Dish (1909), Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910), and Ma Jolie, also known as Woman with a Guitar (1911–12).

Collages and further development

About 1911 Picasso and Georges Braque (1882–1963) began to introduce letters and scraps of newspapers into their cubist paintings, thus creating an entirely new medium, the cubist collage. Picasso's first, and probably his most celebrated, collage is Still Life with Chair Caning (1911–1912).

After Picasso experimented with the new medium of collage, he returned more intensively to painting. In his Three Musicians (1921), the planes became broader, more simplified, and more colorful. In its richness of feeling and balance of formal elements, the Three Musicians represents a classical expression of cubism.

Additional achievements

Picasso also created sculpture and prints throughout his long career, and made numerous important contributions to both media. He periodically worked in ceramics, and designed sets, curtains, and interiors for the theater.

In painting, even the development of cubism fails to define Picasso's genius. About 1915, and again in the early 1920s, he turned away from abstraction and produced drawings and paintings in a realistic and serenely beautiful classical style. One of the most famous of these works is the Woman in White (1923). Painted just two years after the Three Musicians, the quiet and unobtrusive (not calling attention to itself) elegance of this masterpiece testifies to the ease with which Picasso could express himself pictorially.

One of Picasso's most celebrated paintings of the 1930s is Guernica (1937). This work had been commissioned for the Spanish Government Building at the Paris World's Fair. It depicts the destruction by bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39; the military revolt against the Spanish government). The artist's deep feelings about the work, and about the massacre (a mass killing) which inspired it, are reflected in the fact that he completed the work, that is more than 25 feet wide and 11 feet high, within six or seven weeks.

Guernica is an extraordinary monument within the history of modern art. Executed entirely in black, white, and gray, it projects an image of pain, suffering, and brutality that has few parallels. Picasso applied the pictorial language of cubism to a subject that springs directly from social and political awareness.

Picasso's politics

Picasso also declared publicly in 1947 that he was a Communist (someone who believes the national government should control all businesses and the distribution of goods). When he was asked why he was a Communist, he stated, "When I was a boy in Spain, I was very poor and aware of how poor people had to live. I learned that the Communists were for the poor people. That was enough to know. So I became for the Communists." But sometimes the Communist cause was not as keen on Picasso as Picasso was about being a Communist. A 1953 portrait he painted of Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) caused an uproar in the Communist Party's leadership. The Soviet government banished his works.

Although Picasso had been in exile from his native Spain since the 1939 victory of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1892–1975), he gave eight hundred to nine hundred of his earliest works to the city and people of Barcelona. To display these works, the Palacio Aguilar was renamed the Picasso Museum and the works were moved inside. But because of Franco's dislike for Picasso, Picasso's name never appeared on the museum.

Picasso was married twice, first to dancer Olga Khoklova and then to Jacqueline Roque. He had four children. He was planning an exhibit of over two hundred of his works at the Avignon Arts Festival in France when he died at his thirty-five-room hilltop villa of Notre Dame de Vie in Mougins, France, on April 8, 1973.

The discovery of cubism represents Picasso's most important achievement in the history of twentieth-century art. Throughout his life he exhibited a remarkable genius for sculpture, graphics, and ceramics, as well as painting. His is one of the most celebrated artists of the modern period.

For More Information

Cowling, Elizabeth. Interpreting Matisse, Picasso. Harry N. Abrams, 2002.

Léal, Brigitte, Christine Piot, and Marie-Laure Bernadac. The Ultimate Picasso. Edited by Molly Stevens and Marjolijn de Jager. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000.

Olivier, Fernande. Picasso and His Friends. New York: Appleton-Century, 1965.

Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso. New York: Random House, 1991.

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Pablo Picasso Lesson for Kids: Biography & Facts

Table of contents, the life of picasso, picasso's art, hey, is that a picasso, lesson summary.

Lots of people visit art museums and think, 'That isn't so hard. I can do that.' Maybe you could, but what matters is someone else did it first. Pablo Picasso was one of these artists, and his works are displayed in museums across the world. Picasso was not just a painter. He was also a poet and sculptor. He even designed scenery and wrote plays for the theater.

Picasso was born in Spain in 1881 and died in 1973. Like most dates in history, it is important to know what was going on in the world. There were many wars during Picasso's time. These wars had an effect on Picasso's work. The women and children in Picasso's life also helped shape his work. Picasso also made many friends, and some of these friends helped Picasso create a whole new style of art.

Before Picasso became famous, his life was hard. Sometimes he even had to burn his paintings to stay warm! Even though Picasso came from Spain, he spent most of his life in France. When the German Nazi soldiers took over France during World War II, Picasso liked France so much that he stayed in Paris and refused to leave. After the war, Picasso became very famous and rich.

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It is easier to think of Picasso in the way and times he did his work. Picasso's artwork is broken up into several different periods, with the first one being the Blue Period . The Blue Period paintings reflected Picasso's time in Spain and showed sad stories of life, like people begging in the street. Picasso was sad during this time. Guess what color Picasso used at this time? Blue, of course.

One of the periods Picasso is arguably most well known for is his Cubism Period . Imagine creating lots of triangles, squares, rectangles and other different shapes in a picture. That is what Picasso did. By putting all the shapes together, Picasso demonstrated cubism and created beautiful paintings and sculptures with this technique. The world had never really seen anything like it.

If someone says they have a Picasso, they are probably very rich. Even though Picasso made thousands of paintings and statues, his work is now very popular. In museums around the world, works by Picasso get people excited. One of Picasso's paintings sold for over $170,000,000! Today, you can see Picasso's work and influence on everything from coffee cups to magnets to flower pots. Picasso helped change how people think about art.

Picasso was an important artist from the 1900s who was born in Spain but lived most of his life in France. Picasso helped to create a new style of art known as cubism. Picasso's work is very famous.

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Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso designed costumes and scenery for five ballets performed by a Russian ballet company.

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(1881–1973). The reaction in the late 19th century against naturalism in art led to a sequence of different movements in the 20th century. In each of these periods of innovation Pablo Picasso played an important part. He said that to repeat oneself is to go against “the constant flight forward of the spirit.” Primarily a painter, he also became a fine sculptor, engraver, and ceramist.

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. His father, an art teacher, early recognized his son’s genius. Picasso studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona, where his father was appointed professor in 1896. Pablo had already mastered realistic technique, however, and had little use for school. At 16 he had his own studio in Barcelona. In 1900 he first visited Paris, and in 1904 he settled there.

Picasso’s personal style began to form in the years from 1901 to 1904, a period often referred to as his blue period because of the pervasive blue tones he used in his paintings at that time. In 1905, as he became more successful, Picasso altered his palette, and the blue tones gave way to a terra-cotta color, a shade of deep pinkish red. At the same time his subject matter grew less melancholy and included dancers, acrobats, and harlequins. The paintings he did during the years between 1905 and 1907 are said to belong to his rose period.

In 1907 Picasso struck off in an entirely different direction with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon . This painting shows the influence of his new fascination with primitive art and carvings, especially those of African origin. The picture represents a major turning point in art because it opened the door to cubism and the later abstract movement. Working with his friend and fellow painter Georges Braque , Picasso began experimenting with increasingly analytical and geometric forms. His painting The Three Musicians , which dates from 1921, is one of his major achievements using this technique ( see painting ).

In 1917 Picasso had gone to Rome to design costumes and scenery for Sergei Diaghilev ’s Ballets Russes. This work stimulated another departure in Picasso’s work, and he began to paint the works now referred to as belonging to his classic period, which lasted from about 1918 until 1925.

At the same time he was working on designs for the ballet, Picasso also continued to develop the cubist technique, making it less rigorous and austere. By the time he painted Guernica , his moving vision of the Spanish Civil War, the straight lines of early cubism had given way to curved forms. This huge painting, considered by many to be his masterpiece, was Picasso’s response to the 1937 bombing by the Fascist forces of the small Basque town of Guernica. He completed this emotional political statement in the same year. In it, as in many of his later pictures, distortions of form approach surrealism, but Picasso never called himself a surrealist.

From about 1904, shortly after he settled in Paris, until 1911, Picasso had lived with Fernande Olivier, who may have inspired the sunnier outlook reflected in his rose period. From about 1911 until her death in 1917, he lived with Marcelle Humbert. In 1918 Picasso married a young Russian ballerina, Olga Koklova. The couple, who later separated and were divorced in 1935, had one son, Paulo. Olga died in 1955. In 1961, at the age of 80, the artist married his model, Jacqueline Roque.

In the time between these two marriages, Picasso shared his life with several women who influenced his work and provided him with a family. His mistresses included Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom he met in the early 1930s and who was the mother of his daughter Maia, and Dora Maat, a Yugoslavian whom he met in 1936. Françoise Gilot, who lived with Picasso between 1946 and 1953, was the mother of his youngest children—Claude, born in 1947, and Paloma, born two years later. His association with Gilot inspired Picasso to create a charming series of paintings that featured a mythologically inspired world of fauns, nymphs, centaurs, and pipers.

Picasso remained in France throughout World War II, but he was forbidden to exhibit his work after the German occupation. He joined the French Communist party in 1944. In 1955 he moved to the French Riviera.

Picasso continued to work with incredible speed and versatility—as painter, ceramist, sculptor, designer, and graphic artist—into his 90s. The value of his estate was estimated at more than 500 million dollars when he died on April 8, 1973, in Mougins, France.

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Pablo Picasso Facts & Worksheets

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Table of Contents

Pablo Picasso was one of the most famous and influential artists of the 20th century. Originally from Spain , Picasso spent most of his life in France , where he created some of his most renowned artworks including Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Girl Before a Mirror, and Le Reve.

See the fact file below for more information on the Pablo Picasso or alternatively, you can download our 19-page Pablo Picasso worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

Early and personal life.

• Pablo Picasso was born ‘Pablo Ruiz y Picasso’ in Malaga in Andalucia, Spain, on October 25, 1881.
• He was born to Spanish parents, Don Jose Ruiz y Blasco, a painter and art teacher, and Maria Picasso y Lopez.
• Young Pablo was raised as a Catholic, but later declared himself an atheist.
• At age seven, Pablo began attending school in drawing and oil painting in the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona.

CAREER AND ACHIEVEMENTS

• “Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should… Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.” Pablo Picasso
• Art historians categorize Pablo Picasso’s career into a number of distinct periods. First, the Blue Period which lasted from 1901 to 1904, which resonated his long-lasting depression after he learned of the death of a friend, Carlos Casagemas.
• The Rose Period began in the fall of 1904 and ended later in 1906, which manifested paintings with bright colors, including pink and red tones. Picasso featured actors, acrobats, and athletes in his work.
• The African-Influenced Period followed next which became known as the first step to shape deformation. In Picasso’s first work, he attempted to paint the writer Gertrude Stein in a classical way. He then painted her 80 times.
• In the coming years, Picasso produced paintings in Cubism.
• From 1909, Picasso and fellow artist, Georges Braque, began to develop Cubism – a style of painting where the objects and subjects of the paintings and sculptures were broken down and re-assembled in abstract form.
• Famous Picasso Cubist works include Girl with a Mandolin, Le Guitariste, and L’homme aux cartes.
• Moreover, he also painted in other styles including classicism and surrealism.
• In 1936, when a civil war broke out in Spain, Picasso used his paints and brush to support anti-fascists sentiments.
• During World War II , Picasso was questioned by the German Gestapo because his artwork did not match the Nazi ideal. During this time he turned to poetry rather than painting.
• By the end of the war, he began to create ensembles of pictures and panels. Among his common subjects were nature, naked women, and fairy-tale creatures.
• He produced over 50,000 pieces of artwork in his lifetime, including paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, and tapestries.
• Picasso’s early paintings in the 1890s followed the realism movement. This meant his paintings depicted real-life people and events.
• Picasso’s sculptures in the late 1800s were mainly made from wood or clay. From the 1900s he began to use more diverse materials, such as steel and wire.
• The ‘minotaur’ became a feature of many of Picasso’s paintings in the 1930s. The Guernica is the most famous example.
• From the 1950s, Picasso began to create more sculptures. Famous Picasso sculptures include Chicago Picasso, Woman’s Head, and She-Goat. The Chicago Picasso is a 50-foot sculpture that Picasso donated to the people of Chicago.

Pablo Picasso Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about Pablo Picasso across 19 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use Pablo Picasso worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about Pablo Picasso who was one of the most famous and influential artists of the 20th century. Originally from Spain, Picasso spent most of his life in France, where he created some of his most renowned artworks including Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Girl Before a Mirror, and Le Reve.

Complete List Of Included Worksheets

• Pablo Picasso Facts
• The Name Picasso
• Famous Painters
• Picasso Periods
• Between the Two
• Be Like Picasso
• Truths of Picasso
• Picasso and Guernica
• Dream and Lie of Franco II
• Fascinating Picasso
• Priciest in the World

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Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, famous for paintings like ‘Guernica’ and for the art movement known as Cubism.

(1881-1973)

Who Was Pablo Picasso?

Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain, on October 25, 1881. Picasso's mother was Doña Maria Picasso y Lopez. His father was Don José Ruiz Blasco, a painter and art teacher.

His gargantuan full name, which honors a variety of relatives and saints, is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso.

A serious and prematurely world-weary child, the young Picasso possessed a pair of piercing, watchful black eyes that seemed to mark him destined for greatness.

"When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk you'll end up as the pope,'" he later recalled. "Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."

Though he was a relatively poor student, Picasso displayed a prodigious talent for drawing at a very young age. According to legend, his first words were "piz, piz," his childish attempt at saying "lápiz," the Spanish word for pencil.

Picasso's father began teaching him to draw and paint when he was a child, and by the time he was 13 years old, his skill level had surpassed his father's. Soon, Picasso lost all desire to do any schoolwork, choosing to spend the school days doodling in his notebook instead.

"For being a bad student, I was banished to the 'calaboose,' a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on," he later remembered. "I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly ... I could have stayed there forever, drawing without stopping."

In 1895, when Picasso was 14 years old, his family moved to Barcelona, Spain, where he quickly applied to the city's prestigious School of Fine Arts. Although the school typically only accepted students several years his senior, Picasso's entrance exam was so extraordinary that he was granted an exception and admitted.

Nevertheless, Picasso chafed at the School of Fine Arts' strict rules and formalities, and began skipping class so that he could roam the streets of Barcelona, sketching the city scenes he observed.

In 1897, a 16-year-old Picasso moved to Madrid to attend the Royal Academy of San Fernando. However, he again became frustrated with his school's singular focus on classical subjects and techniques.

During this time, he wrote to a friend: "They just go on and on about the same old stuff: Velázquez for painting, Michelangelo for sculpture." Once again, Picasso began skipping class to wander the city and paint what he observed: gypsies, beggars and prostitutes, among other things.

In 1899, Picasso moved back to Barcelona and fell in with a crowd of artists and intellectuals who made their headquarters at a café called El Quatre Gats ("The Four Cats").

Inspired by the anarchists and radicals he met there, Picasso made his decisive break from the classical methods in which he had been trained, and began what would become a lifelong process of experimentation and innovation.

Picasso remains renowned for endlessly reinventing himself, switching between styles so radically different that his life's work seems to be the product of five or six great artists rather than just one.

Of his penchant for style diversity, Picasso insisted that his varied work was not indicative of radical shifts throughout his career, but, rather, of his dedication to objectively evaluating for each piece the form and technique best suited to achieve his desired effect.

"Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should," he explained. "Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it."

Blue Period

Art critics and historians typically break Picasso's adult career into distinct periods, the first of which lasted from 1901 to 1904 and is called his "Blue Period," after the color that dominated nearly all of his paintings over these years.

At the turn of the 20th century, Picasso moved to Paris, France — the center of European art — to open his own studio. Lonely and deeply depressed over the death of his close friend, Carlos Casagemas, he painted scenes of poverty, isolation and anguish, almost exclusively in shades of blue and green.

'Blue Nude’ and ‘The Old Guitarist’

Picasso's most famous paintings from the Blue Period include "Blue Nude," "La Vie" and "The Old Guitarist," all three of which were completed in 1903.

In contemplation of Picasso and his Blue Period, writer and critic Charles Morice once asked, "Is this frighteningly precocious child not fated to bestow the consecration of a masterpiece on the negative sense of living, the illness from which he more than anyone else seems to be suffering?"

Rose Period: 'Gertrude Stein' and 'Two Nudes'

By 1905, Picasso had largely overcome the depression that had previously debilitated him, and the artistic manifestation of Picasso's improved spirits was the introduction of warmer colors—including beiges, pinks and reds—in what is known as his "Rose Period" (1904-06).

Not only was he madly in love with a beautiful model, Fernande Olivier, he was newly prosperous thanks to the generous patronage of art dealer Ambroise Vollard. His most famous paintings from these years include "Family at Saltimbanques" (1905), "Gertrude Stein" (1905-06) and "Two Nudes" (1906).

Cubism was an artistic style pioneered by Picasso and his friend and fellow painter Georges Braque.

In Cubist paintings, objects are broken apart and reassembled in an abstracted form, highlighting their composite geometric shapes and depicting them from multiple, simultaneous viewpoints in order to create physics-defying, collage-like effects. At once destructive and creative, Cubism shocked, appalled and fascinated the art world.

‘Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon’

In 1907, Picasso produced a painting that today is considered the precursor and inspiration of Cubism: "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."

A chilling depiction of five nude prostitutes, abstracted and distorted with sharp geometric features and stark blotches of blues, greens and grays, the work was unlike anything he or anyone else had ever painted before and would profoundly influence the direction of art in the 20th century.

"It made me feel as if someone was drinking gasoline and spitting fire," Braque said, explaining that he was shocked when he first viewed Picasso's "Les Demoiselles." Braque quickly became intrigued with Cubism, seeing the new style as a revolutionary movement.

French writer and critic Max Jacob, a good friend of both Picasso and painter Juan Gris, called Cubism "the 'Harbinger Comet' of the new century," stating, "Cubism is ... a picture for its own sake. Literary Cubism does the same thing in literature, using reality merely as a means and not as an end."

Picasso's early Cubist paintings, known as his "Analytic Cubist" works, include "Three Women" (1907), "Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table" (1909) and "Girl with Mandolin" (1910).

His later Cubist works are distinguished as "Synthetic Cubism" for moving even further away from artistic typicalities of the time, creating vast collages out of a great number of tiny, individual fragments. These paintings include "Still Life with Chair Caning" (1912), "Card Player" (1913-14) and "Three Musicians" (1921).

Classical Period: ‘Three Women at the Spring’

Picasso’s works between 1918 and 1927 are categorized as part of his "Classical Period," a brief return to Realism in a career otherwise dominated by experimentation. The outbreak of World War I ushered in the next great change in Picasso's art.

He grew more somber and, once again, preoccupied with the depiction of reality. His most interesting and important works from this period include "Three Women at the Spring" (1921), "Two Women Running on the Beach/The Race" (1922) and "The Pipes of Pan" (1923).

From 1927 onward, Picasso became caught up in a new philosophical and cultural movement known as Surrealism , the artistic manifestation of which was a product of his own Cubism.

Picasso's most well-known Surrealist painting, deemed one of the greatest paintings of all time, was completed in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War: "Guernica." After Nazi German bombers supporting Francisco Franco 's Nationalist forces carried out a devastating aerial attack on the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, Picasso, outraged by the bombing and the inhumanity of war, painted this work of art.

In black, white and grays, the painting is a Surrealist testament to the horrors of war, and features a minotaur and several human-like figures in various states of anguish and terror. "Guernica" remains one of the most moving and powerful anti-war paintings in history.

Later Works: 'Self Portrait Facing Death'

In contrast to the dazzling complexity of Synthetic Cubism, Picasso's later paintings display simple, childlike imagery and crude technique. Touching on the artistic validity of these later works, Picasso once remarked upon passing a group of school kids in his old age, "When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael , but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them."

In the aftermath of World War II , Picasso became more overtly political, joining the Communist Party. He was twice honored with the International Lenin Peace Prize, first in 1950 and again in 1961.

By this point in his life, he was also an international celebrity, the world's most famous living artist. While paparazzi chronicled his every move, however, few paid attention to his art during this time. Picasso continued to create art and maintain an ambitious schedule in his later years, superstitiously believing that work would keep him alive.

Picasso created the epitome of his later work, "Self Portrait Facing Death," using pencil and crayon, a year before his death. The autobiographical subject, drawn with crude technique, appears as something between a human and an ape, with a green face and pink hair. Yet the expression in his eyes, capturing a lifetime of wisdom, fear and uncertainty, is the unmistakable work of a master at the height of his powers.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S PABLO PICASSO FACT CARD

A lifelong womanizer, Picasso had countless relationships with girlfriends, mistresses, muses and prostitutes, marrying only twice.

He wed a ballerina named Olga Khokhlova in 1918, and they remained together for nine years, parting ways in 1927. They had a son together, Paulo. In 1961, at the age of 79, he married his second wife, Jacqueline Roque.

While married to Khokhlova, he began a long-term relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter. They had a daughter, Maya, together. Walter committed suicide after Picasso died.

Between marriages, in 1935, Picasso met Dora Maar, a fellow artist, on the set of Jean Renoir's film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (released in 1936). The two soon embarked upon a partnership that was both romantic and professional.

Their relationship lasted more than a decade, during and after which time Maar struggled with depression; they parted ways in 1946, three years after Picasso began having an affair with a woman named Françoise Gilot, with whom he had two children, son Claude and daughter Paloma. They went separate ways in 1953. (Gilot would later marry scientist Jonas Salk , the inventor of the polio vaccine.)

Picasso fathered four children: Paulo (Paul), Maya, Claude and Paloma Picasso. His daughter Paloma - featured in several of her father's paintings - would become a famous designer, crafting jewelry and other items for Tiffany & Co.

Picasso died on April 8, 1973, at the age of 91, in Mougins, France. He died of heart failure, reportedly while he and his wife Jacqueline were entertaining friends for dinner.

Considered radical in his work, Picasso continues to garner reverence for his technical mastery, visionary creativity and profound empathy. Together, these qualities have distinguished the "disquieting" Spaniard with the "piercing" eyes as a revolutionary artist.

For nearly 80 of his 91 years, Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that he superstitiously believed would keep him alive, contributing significantly to — and paralleling the entire development of — modern art in the 20th century.

Georges Braque

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QUICK FACTS

• Name: Pablo Picasso
• Birth Year: 1881
• Birth date: October 25, 1881
• Birth City: Málaga
• Birth Country: Spain
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, famous for paintings like ‘Guernica’ and for the art movement known as Cubism.
• World War II
• Astrological Sign: Scorpio
• La Llotja (Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi)
• Royal Academy of San Fernando
• School of Fine Arts (Barcelona, Spain)
• Nacionalities
• Interesting Facts
• Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that he superstitiously believed would keep him alive.
• Pablo Picasso's full name was: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso.
• Death Year: 1973
• Death date: April 8, 1973
• Death City: Mougins
• Death Country: France

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Pablo Picasso Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/artists/pablo-picasso
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: August 28, 2019
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should. Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.
• If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
• When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.
• Everything you can imagine is real.
• Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
• For being a bad student, I was banished to the 'calaboose,' a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on. I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly ... I could have stayed there forever, drawing without stopping.
• When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll end up as the pope.' Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
• Is this frighteningly precocious child not fated to bestow the consecration of a masterpiece on the negative sense of living, the illness from which he more than anyone else seems to be suffering?
• If you don't know what color to take, take black.
• Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.
• God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.
• It's not what the artist does that counts. But what he is.
• Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a bird?
• Of course, you can paint pictures by matching up different parts of them so that they go nicely together, but they'll lack any kind of drama.
• It has often been said that an artist should work for himself, for the love of art, and scorn success. It's a false idea. An artist needs success. Not only in order to live, but primarily so that he can realize his work.
• Nothing can be done without solitude.
• In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.
• I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What's the point of that? Simply that I want nothing but emotion given off by it.
• People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

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Pablo Picasso: Art primary resource

Explore the life and works of artist pablo picasso.

This primary resource introduces children to artist Pablo Picasso. Discover the artist’s development over his lifetime. By what age was he a better painter than his father? What was his most famous work? When does Malaga hold a festival in Picasso’s honour?

Pupils will learn about Pablo Picasso’s life and works, and the influence they have had on modern day artistic styles, such as cubism, in our National Geographic Kids’ Art primary resource sheet.

The teaching resource can be used in study group tasks for looking at the significance and influence of Picasso’s works. It can also be used as a printed handout for each pupil to review and annotate, or for display on the interactive whiteboard using the images included in the resource to open a class discussion.

Activity: Ask children to use the information in the resource sheet to make their own Picasso-style portrait. Pupils could be shown further examples of Picasso’s works and discuss which pieces they like, or which pieces they don’t, giving reasons for their answers. They could compare the work of Picasso with other well-known artists (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci), whose style do they find most interesting? Why?

N.B. The following information for mapping the resource documents to the school curriculum is specifically tailored to the English National Curriculum and Scottish Curriculum for Excellence . We are currently working to bring specifically tailored curriculum resource links for our other territories; including South Africa , Australia and New Zealand . If you have any queries about our upcoming curriculum resource links, please email: [email protected]

This Pablo Picasso primary resource assists with teaching the following Key Stage 1 Art objective from the National Curriculum :

Pupils should be taught:

• about the work of a range of artists, craft makers and designers, describing the differences and similarities between different practices and disciplines, and making links to their own work.

National Curriculum Key Stage 2 Art objectives:

Pupils should be taught:  

• to create sketch books to record their observations and use them to review and revisit ideas
• about great artists, architects and designers in history.

This Pablo Picasso Art primary resource assists with teaching the following Expressive arts First – Third level objectives from the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence :

• I can respond to the work of artists and designers by discussing my thoughts and feelings. I can give and accept constructive comment on my own and others’ work.

Scottish Curriculum for Excellence Fourth level Expressive arts objectives:

• I can analyse art and design techniques, processes and concepts, make informed judgements and express considered opinions on my own and others’ work

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10 Fast Facts About Pablo Picasso and HIs Most Famous Paintings (Plus Lesson Plans)

Inside : Learn facts about Pablo Picasso, see the most famous Picasso paintings, quotes, and lesson plans for teachers.

Pablo Picasso is among the most important and beloved artist of all time.

His influence in 20th century art cannot be overestimated, as the co-creator of Cubism and pioneer of modern art as we know it.

From PabloPicasso.or g ,

“ There had been no other artists, prior to Picasso, who had such an impact on the art world, or had a mass following of fans and critics alike, as he did.”

This post gives you a quick introduction to Picasso’s life and work, as well as resources for a deeper dive to learn more.

There’s a lot, so here’s an index of what’s included in the post. You can click on any link to jump straight to that section: 1. Pablo Picasso Facts 2. Pablo Picasso Famous Paintings 3. Pablo Picasso Lesson Plans for Teachers 4. Pablo Picasso Children’s Books 5. Videos About Pablo Picasso

10 Fast FActs About Pablo Picasso

October 25, 1881 in Málaga, Spain

José Ruiz Blasco and María Picasso López. His father, Ruiz, was also a painter and teacher.

Picasso began studying with his father at age 7. He formally studied at a few art schools in both Spain and France but he did not like school and was often put into detention. Picasso stopped his formal studies in 1899.

Picasso was not just a painter. He produced sculptures, pottery, ballet sets, poetry, drawings, and more.

He is famous for Cubism : using cube shapes in his work, or taking shapes apart and putting them back together in a different way. His experiments in collages were very influential as well.

Painting Periods:

Several distinct styles and stages are apparent in Picasso’s art.

Though his work began in his childhood, here is a rough outline of the commonly agreed-upon periods of his painting:

• The Blue Period (1901 – 1904)
• The Rose (Pink) Period (1904 – 1906)
• The African Period (1907 – 1909)
• Cubism , Analytic and Synthetic (1909 – 1919)
• Neo-Classicism (1919 – 1928)
• Surrealism (1925 – 1930’s)

Picasso is considered one of the most prolific painters of all time. He produced over 145,000 works, which include more than 13,000 paintings. He is also credited as the originator of Cubism with Georges Braque.

Children and Spouses:

Picasso was married twice and had four children: Paul, Maya, Claude, and Paloma.

Picasso died April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France.

Picasso’s first word as a baby was piz , from lápiz — the Spanish word for pencil.

His talents for art were obvious even as a child. His father declared he would stop painting when Picasso’s pre-teen paintings were better than his own.

Here is a painting Picasso did of his mother, at only 15 years old. You can see his obvious talent and classical training:

11 Pablo Picasso Famous Paintings

1. the old guitarist, 1903.

2. Boy With A Pipe, 1905

3. Family of Saltimbanques, 1905

4. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

5. Ma Jolie, 1911

6. Three Musicians, 1921

7. Girl Before a Mirror, 1932

8. The Weeping Woman, 1937

9. Portrait of Dora Maar, 1937

10. Guernica, 1937

11. Jacqueline with Flowers, 1954

Pablo Picasso Lesson Plans

Free Resources in English:

• Printable page for students to read about Picasso and do a written response, with discussion questions for teacher-led conversation (middle school).
• Printable PDF word search for terms related to Pablo Picasso
• 1-page Picasso biography with questions (middle school)
• Inferential reading activity and craftivity about Picasso craftivity (elementary)
• Printable board game to review some information about Cubism

Free Spanish Resources from TpT:

• Creative printable worksheet for recording facts about Pablo Picasso (upper elementary – middle school).
• This is an adorable printable personality test for students to read in Spanish and decide which famous Spanish-speaking artist they are most life (middle – high school).
• Picasso Escape Room Bonus Puzzle for studying different painting (digital and printable).
• Slideshow for introducing students to Picasso and Guernica, for novice-level Spanish learners.
• This is a brilliant way to review body parts in Spanish and Picasso paintings – BUT, the creator included paintings that include (abstract) nudity. It’s such a creative idea I wanted to link to it, but be sure to preview to see which parts you can use. Link here .

You can also check out these bundles for learning about famous Spanish-speakers:

Pablo Picasso Art Projects for Kids

What better way to learn about Pablo Picasso than through art? There are many free activities out there, and these were my favorites.

“E very child is an artist. The trouble is how to remain an artist once he grows up” – Pablo Picasso

• Step-by-step directions and lesson for teaching kids how to draw a cubist-style face like Picasso (elementary).
• Picasso’s Mains aux Fleurs activity. Includes free printable hand printouts, to be used with cut out construction paper.
• Three Musicians Collage (ages 10-12). This project gives tribute to Picasso’s famous painting and his usage of collages, using cut-outs of paper.
• Picasso-Inspired Self-Portraits (uses watercolors and oil pastels on white paper).
• Color and Emotions: Picasso Portraits . These portraits explore emotion and color, and can work with young elementary students.
• Collage Self-Portraits , created by mixing cut-out paper and cut-out from magazines. There are great pictures to help you see exactly what to do!
• Rooster Chalk Art Inspired by Picasso’s Rooster Painting (uses black paper, oil pastels, and chalk).
• Free Printable of Several Picasso works, for coloring: – Picasso’s 1907 Self-Portrait – The Old Man with the Guitar – Boy With a Pipe – Three Musicians
• More free printable for Picasso coloring pages, including a print of Guernica .

Pablo Picasso Children’s Books

Videos about pablo picasso.

There are quite a few well-done YouTube videos with facts about Pablo Picasso for kids to adults. Some are almost an hour in length, but here are some of my top choices for shorter videos!

Pablo Picasso for Young Students:

This video briefly introduces Picasso to kids in English, and then demonstrates a collage activity for children.

What Is Cubism?

This is a fantastic fast-paced, illustrated intro to Cubism for kids, showing two forms of cubism in action (5min 25s).

Another school-friendly Pablo Picasso biography:

This includes lots and lots of images of Picasso’s most famous paintings and other works (4min 16s).

For middle – high school:

A thorough yet concise exploration of Picasso’s life and art, in Spanish. It does contain some works that portray nudity, though nothing graphic (6min 23s).

Draw My Life Picasso Biography in Spanish:

Another summary of Picasso. This one does include some nudity as well, though as part of the cartoon drawings of his paintings. (6min 36s).

I hope these resources were helpful to you! If you have more ideas for resources or lessons, let me know in the comments below!

Image Sources:

Image 2:  “ s-pablo-picasso-large640 ” ( CC BY-NC 2.0 ) by  CyberHades Image 3: “ Self-Portrait with Palette [1906] ” ( CC BY-SA 2.0 ) by  NichoDesign Image 4: “ Picasso, The Old Guitarist ” ( CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 ) by  profzucker Image 5: “ Boy with a Pipe [1905] ” ( CC BY-SA 2.0 ) by  NichoDesign Image 6: “ Family of Saltimbanques ” ( CC BY-NC 2.0 ) by  Thomas Hawk Image 7: “ Les Demoiselles d’Avignon ” ( CC BY-NC 2.0 ) by  Thomas Hawk Image 8:  “ NYC – MoMA: Pablo Picasso’s ”Ma Jolie” ” ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ) by  wallyg Image 9: “ Picasso Three Musicians ” ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ) by  Sassholes Image 10: “ Girl Before a Mirror ” ( CC BY-NC 2.0 ) by  Thomas Hawk Image 11: “ Weeping Woman ” ( CC BY-NC 2.0 ) by  lluisribesmateu1969 Image 12: “ IMGP2299 ” ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ) by  dvdbramhall Image 13: “ Picasso – «Guernica» ” ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ) by  magal (Manuel Galrinho) Image 14: “ Jacqueline with Flowers ” ( CC BY-NC 2.0 ) by  lluisribesmateu1969

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The Story of Pablo Picasso: An Inspiring Biography for Young Readers (The Story of Biographies) Paperback – November 22, 2022

Discover the life of Pablo Picasso―a story about endless imagination and creativity for kids ages 6 to 9

Pablo Picasso was a famous artist who loved to break the rules and try out new ideas. Before he transformed what people thought about art, he was a young boy who loved to draw and observe the world around him. He mastered classical art styles and then invented new ways of expressing his creativity. This book explores how Picasso went from being a talented boy growing up in Spain to a respected artist who changed the world.

• Core curriculum ―Discover the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How of Picasso's life and take a quick quiz to test your knowledge.
• Short chapters ―This Picasso biography is broken up into brief chapters that make it fun for new readers like you to discover details about his life.
• His lasting legacy ―Kids will find out how Picasso changed the art world and inspired countless others to express themselves through creativity.

How will Picasso's imagination and originality inspire you?

• Part of series The Story Of: A Biography Series for New Readers
• Print length 64 pages
• Language English
• Grade level 2 - 3
• Lexile measure 740L
• Dimensions 5.83 x 0.16 x 8.27 inches
• Publisher Callisto Kids
• Publication date November 22, 2022
• ISBN-10 1685398650
• ISBN-13 978-1685398651
• See all details

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

About the author.

CIARA O’NEAL is a mother of five, teacher, curriculum designer, and author of Flamingo Hugs Aren’t for Everyone and The Truth About Life as a Pro Gamer . She loves reading, silly puns, and corgis. Follow her on Twitter @CiaraONeal2.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Callisto Kids (November 22, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 64 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1685398650
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1685398651
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 6 - 10 years, from customers
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 740L
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 2 - 3
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.83 x 0.16 x 8.27 inches
• #178 in Children's Art Biographies (Books)
• #1,728 in Children's Art Books (Books)
• #2,902 in Children's Explore the World Books (Books)

About the author

Ciara o'neal.

Combine humor and picture books. Stir in a middle school library. Add in a pinch of nonfiction writing, two crazy cats, and seven kids…and Voila! You have author, Ciara O’Neal. This busy southern mama is also a media technology specialist, librarian, book blogger, and a purveyor of puns. She plots world domination with a donut in each hand.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Pablo picasso (1881–1973).

Marble head from the figure of a woman

Woman in Green

Pablo Picasso

The Blind Man's Meal

At the Lapin Agile

Gertrude Stein

Bust of a Man

Woman in an Armchair

Standing Female Nude

Still Life with a Bottle of Rum

Man with a Hat and a Violin

Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table

Woman in White

Nude Standing by the Sea

Reading at a Table

The Dream and Lie of Franco II

Faun with Stars

Head of a Woman

James Voorhies Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

The artistic genius of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) has impacted the development of modern and contemporary art with unparalleled magnitude. His prolific output includes over 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets and costumes that convey myriad intellectual, political, social, and amorous messages. His creative styles transcend realism and abstraction, Cubism , Neoclassicism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. Born in Málaga, Spain, in 1881, Picasso studied art briefly in Madrid in 1897, then in Barcelona in 1899, where he became closely associated with a group of modernist poets, writers, and artists who gathered at the café Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats), including the Catalan Carlos Casagemas (1880–1901).

Living intermittently in Paris and Spain until 1904, his work during these years suggests feelings of desolation and darkness inspired in part by the suicide of his friend Casagemas. Picasso’s paintings from late 1901 to about the middle of 1904, referred to as his Blue Period, depict themes of poverty, loneliness, and despair. In The Blind Man’s Meal ( 50.188 ) from 1903, he uses a dismal range of blues to sensitively render a lonely figure encumbered by his condition as he holds a crust of bread in one hand and awkwardly grasps for a pitcher with the other. The elongated, corkscrew bodies of El Greco (1540/41–1614) inspire the man’s distorted features.

Picasso moved to Paris in 1904 and settled in the artist quarter Bateau-Lavoir, where he lived among bohemian poets and writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) and Max Jacob (1876–1944). In At the Lapin Agile ( 1992.391 ) from 1905, Picasso directed his attention toward more pleasant themes such as carnival performers, harlequins, and clowns. In this painting, he used his own image for the harlequin figure and abandoned the daunting blues in favor of vivid hues, red for example, to celebrate the lives of circus performers (categorically labeled his Rose Period). In Paris, he found dedicated patrons in American siblings Gertrude (1874–1946) and Leo (1872–1947) Stein, whose Saturday-evening salons in their home at 27, rue des Fleurus was an incubator for modern artistic and intellectual thought. At the Steins he met other artists living and working in the city—generally referred to as the School of Paris —such as Henri Matisse (1869–1954). Painted in 1905–6, Gertrude Stein ( 47.106 ) records Picasso’s new fascination with pre-Roman Iberian sculpture and African and Oceanic art. Concentrating on intuition rather than strict observation, and unsatisfied with the features of Stein’s face, Picasso reworked her image into a masklike manifestation stimulated by primitivism. The influence of African and Oceanic art is explicit in his masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; Museum of Modern Art, New York), a painting that signals the nascent stages of Cubism. Here the figure arrangement recalls Cézanne’s compositions of bathers, while stylistically it is influenced by primitivism, evident by the angular planes and well-defined contours that create an overall sculptural solidity in the figures.

The basic principles of Analytic Cubism (1910–12), with its fragmentation of three-dimensional forms on a two-dimensional picture plane, are embodied in Still Life with a Bottle of Rum ( 1999.363.63 ), painted in 1911. The techniques of Analytic Cubism were developed by Picasso and the French artist Georges Braque (1882–1963), who met in 1907. Picasso’s Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table ( 49.70.33 ) of 1912 is an early example of Synthetic Cubism (1912–14), a papier collé in which he pasted newsprint and colored paper onto canvas. Picasso and Braque also included tactile components such as cloth in their Synthetic Cubist works, and sometimes used trompe-l’oeil effects to create the illusion of real objects and textures, such as the grain of wood.

After World War I (1914–18), Picasso reverted to traditional styles, experimenting less with Cubism. In the early 1920s, he devised a unique variant of classicism using mythological images such as centaurs, minotaurs, nymphs, and fauns inspired by the classical world of Italy. Within this renewed expression, referred to as his Neoclassical Period, he created pictures dedicated to motherhood inspired by the birth of his son Paulo in 1921 (his first of four children by three women). Woman in White ( 53.140.4 ) of 1923 shows a woman clothed in a classic, toga-like, white dress resting calmly in a contemplative pose with tousled hair, eliciting a tender lyricism and calming spirit of maternity. Toward the end of the 1920s, Picasso drew on Surrealist imagery and techniques to make pictures of morphed and distorted figures. In Nude Standing by the Sea ( 1996.403.4 ) of 1929, Picasso’s figure recounts the classical pose of a standing nude with her arms upraised, but her body is swollen and monstrously rearranged.

By the early 1930s, Picasso had turned to harmonious colors and sinuous contours that evoke an overall biomorphic sensuality. He painted scenes of women with drooping heads and striking voluptuousness with a renewed sense of optimism and liberty, probably inspired by his affair with a young woman (one of Picasso’s numerous mistresses) named Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909–1977).  Reading at a Table ( 1996.403.1 ) from 1934 uses these expressive qualities of bold colors and gentle curves to portray Marie-Thérèse seated at an oversized table, emphasizing her youth and innocence.

Although still living in France in the 1930s, Picasso was deeply distraught over the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He reacted with a powerfully emotive series of pictures, such as  Dream and Lie of Franco ( 1986.1224.1[2] ), that culminated in the enormous mural Guernica (1937; Reina Sofía National Museum, Madrid), painted in a grisaille palette of gray tones. This painting, Picasso’s contribution to the Spanish Pavilion in the 1937 Exposition Universelle in Paris, is a complex work of horrifying proportion with layers of antiwar symbolism protesting the fascist coup led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

From the late 1940s through the ’60s, Picasso’s creative energy never waned. Living in the south of France, he continued to paint, make ceramics, and experiment with printmaking. His international fame increased with large exhibitions in London, Venice, and Paris, as well as retrospectives in Tokyo in 1951, and Lyon, Rome, Milan, and São Paulo in 1953. A retrospective in New York at the Museum of Modern Art in 1957 garnered a massive amount of attention, with over 100,000 visitors during the first month. This exhibition solidified Picasso’s prominence as museums and private collectors in America, Europe, and Japan vied to acquire his works.

In Faun with Stars ( 1970.305 ) from 1955, Picasso returned to the mythological themes explored in early pictures. Again, incorporating life experience into his painting, he evoked his infatuation with a new love, a young woman named Jacqueline Roque (1927–1986), who became his second wife in 1961 when the artist was seventy-nine years old. Picasso symbolized himself as a faun, calmly and coolly gazing with mature confidence and wisdom at a nymph who blows her instrument to the stars. The picture embraces his spellbound love for Jacqueline.

Even into his eighties and nineties, Picasso produced an enormous number of works and reaped the financial benefits of his success, amassing a personal fortune and a superb collection of his own art, as well as work by other artists. He died in 1973, leaving an artistic legacy that continues to resonate today throughout the world.

Voorhies, James. “Pablo Picasso (1881–1973).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pica/hd_pica.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Karmel, Pepe. Picasso and the Invention of Cubism . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Léal, Brigitte, Christine Piot, and Marie-Laure Bernadac. The Ultimate Picasso . New York: Abrams, 2003.

Olivier, Fernande. Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier . Edited by Marilyn McCully. New York: Abrams, 2001.

Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso . 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1991–96.

Richardson, John, with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully. A Life of Picasso . 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1991.

Rose, Bernice B., and Bernard Ruiz Picasso, eds. Picasso: 200 Masterworks from 1898 to 1972 . Exhibition catalogue. Boston: Bullfinch Press, 2002.

Rubin, William, ed. Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective . Exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980.

Zervos, Christian. Pablo Picasso . 33 vols. (catalogue raisonné). Paris: Cahiers d'Art, 1932–78.

Additional Essays by James Voorhies

• Voorhies, James. “ Europe and the Age of Exploration .” (October 2002)
• Voorhies, James. “ Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) and the Spanish Enlightenment .” (October 2003)
• Voorhies, James. “ Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) .” (October 2004)
• Voorhies, James. “ School of Paris .” (October 2004)
• Voorhies, James. “ Art of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in Naples .” (October 2003)
• Voorhies, James. “ Elizabethan England .” (October 2002)
• Voorhies, James. “ Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and His Circle .” (October 2004)
• Voorhies, James. “ Fontainebleau .” (October 2002)
• Voorhies, James. “ Post-Impressionism .” (October 2004)
• Voorhies, James. “ Domestic Art in Renaissance Italy .” (October 2002)
• Voorhies, James. “ Surrealism .” (October 2004)

Related Essays

• African Influences in Modern Art
• The Lure of Montmartre, 1880–1900
• School of Paris
• Abstract Expressionism
• Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
• Early Cycladic Art and Culture
• El Greco (1541–1614)
• Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) and the Spanish Enlightenment
• Geometric Abstraction
• Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986)
• Henri Matisse (1869–1954)
• Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)
• Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)
• Paul Klee (1879–1940)
• Post-Impressionism
• Trade Relations among European and African Nations
• France, 1900 A.D.–present
• Iberian Peninsula, 1900 A.D.–present
• 20th Century A.D.
• Abstract Art
• Iberian Peninsula
• Modern and Contemporary Art
• Oil on Canvas
• Sculpture in the Round
• Trompe l’Oeil
• Women Artists

Artist or Maker

• Braque, Georges
• Picasso, Pablo

Online Features

• The Artist Project: “Jacques Villeglé on Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso”
• Connections: “Collage” by Mikel Frank
• Connections: “Masks” by Yaëlle Biro and Dirk Breiding

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Who where Pablo Picasso’s children?

A reasoned pablo picasso's family tree.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in 1881 in Malaga (Sout of Spain), but he spent most of his teenage years in Barcelona. There he received a formal artistic education in the most prestigious local art school, and he also met the bohemian modernist artists that showed him there were other ways to produce art. He then moved to France, where he’ll evolve through his famous Blue and Pink periods, until he became the starter of the Cubist style completely transforming the Art History.

But along this, he met many women who inspired him and gave everything to the artist. The women of Picasso were key in his art, that often reflects his love life. And he had kids with some of them, too. Although often Picasso’s children remained shadowed by their father, and people has been more interested in their inheritance fights than them as a family. Let’s discover together the intricate Picasso family tree.

The Picasso Family where Picasso was born

Jose ruiz y blasco (1838-1913) - picasso's father.

Jose Ruiz was the father of Pablo Picasso and the head of Picasso's family. He was an academical artist specialized in still natures, pigeons and landscape. He was an art teacher first in his hometown Malaga, then for a brief period in La Coruña (North of Spain), then finally in the prestigious La Llotja of Barcelona. It was him who gave Picasso his artistical base, encouraging him to paint from a young age, up to the point that at age 13 Picasso was already a master of portrait. And thanks to him Picasso was admitted in La Llotja despite being underage.

Maria Picasso y Lopez (1855-1938) - Picasso's mother

She came from an Italian family that had emigrated to Spain two generations earlier. Her father died of yellow fevers, and she grew up with her three sisters and mother until she married Jose Ruiz, who was 17 years older. Maria always believed in Picasso’s talent, and lovingly kept the drawings, sketches and paintings the kid produced while still in the household. Her collection became the base of the Picasso Museum of Barcelona.

Conchita and Lola - Picasso's sisters

Picasso’s other sister was Lola (Maria de los Dolores). She was 3 years younger than Pablo, and she was a frequent model of the artist during his early years. She married a neuropsychiatrist, Juan Bautista Vilato Gomez, and they had 6 kids. Two of them, Jose and Javier, became painters. After 1926 her mother Maria moved in with them. She passed away in 1958.

All the Pablo Picasso kids, legitimate and illegitime

Paulo picasso (1921-1975), picasso's only legitimate child.

Already an adult, Paulo worked as a private driver for his father, who constantly insulted him and paid him very poorly, leading poor Paulo to alcoholism. Paulo married Emilienne Lotte, who gave him two children: Pablito Picasso (1949-1973) and Marina Picasso (born 1950). After months after Marina was born, Paulo quitted Emilienne to marry Christine Paulpin, with whom he had one sone, Bernard Picasso (1959). Paulo died of liver cancer two years after Pablito’s terrible suicide by drinking bleach.

Maya Widmaier-Picasso (1935-2022)

When Picasso started seeing Dora Maar in 1935, Marie Thérèse and Maya moved to Versailles but Picasso continued to visit them on the weekends. Maya continued to have a relationship with his dad even when he had children with his next lover, François Gilot. She used to visit them in Antibes and even taught Picasso how to swim.

Maya married Pierre Widmaier (that she divorced later on) and they had three children: Olivier, Richard and Diana. Maya’s carreer was devoted to studying and preserving Pablo Picasso’s art, a path that was been followed by her daughter Diana, who is an art historian specialized in Picasso, too. Maya’s son Olivier has written a biography of Picasso titled “Picasso: the real family story”.

Claude Picasso (1947-2023)

By 1953, the relationship between Picasso and Gilot wasn’t working anymore, as Picasso was cheating on her with Geneviève Laporte, so they split up and Gilot took her children with her. Two years later Gilot married Luc Simon, with whom she had another child, Aurelia. In 1958 Claude and his sister Paloma visited Picasso in Cannes, and two years later François Gilot legally recognized the last name Picasso for her children and broke up with Simon . However, the relationship with his father cooled when Françoise Gilot published her “ Life with Picasso ” and the artist felt outraged about it.

Claude worked as an assistant of the famous photographer Richard Avedon. In 1995 he founded the Picasso Administration to control copyrights, authenticity certificates and other legal matters.

Paloma Picasso (Born 1949)

She was always interested in design, collaborating with the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and the Greek jewelry Zolotas. But she lost her will to create after her father passed away. That year se played a role in the erotic film Immoral Tales, but she didn’t act anymore despite the good critics.

In 1978 she married the Argentinian playwright and director Rafael Lopez-Sanchez (born Lopez-Cambil), and two years later she started working for Tiffany & Co. In 1984 she launched her own line of perfume and skin cosmetics with L’Oreal, and in 1987 she created her iconic line of lipstick Mon Rouge also with L’Oreal. Unfortunately Mon Rouge was discontinued after in 1999 Paloma divorced her husband, who claimed a millionaire compensation for having helped her to build her brand.

She then married the osteopathy doctor Eric Thévenet, with whom he continues to live between Switzerland and Morocco. She’s continued to create accessories from sunglasses to sheets and towels, as well as home design items such as porcelain, cristal or silverwear. She hasn’t had any children.

Who are the current Picasso heirs?

So let’s get down to the facts! Picasso had left more than 45,000 pieces, 2 châteaux and three more villas, some $4.5 millions in cash and $1.3 millions in gold. Plus stocks and a personal art collection that included Cezannes, Matisses, Miros… The legal war had started. And the France disposed the auctioneer Maurice Rheims and his team to create a complete inventory… that took 6 years to complete (1974-1981).

In 1975 Paulo passed away, and his children Marina and Bernard took his place as legal heirs. And finally Maya , Paloma and Claude were given the status of legal heirs as well. Part of the agreement included the collaboration of the heirs to create the Picasso Musée of Paris. In 1986 Jacqueline Roque killed herself, unable to live without Pablo Picasso. Her daughter from a previous marriage Catherine (Cathy) Hutin-Blay inherited Jacqueline’s collection of Picasso works as well as the Chateau de Vauvenargues, where Jacqueline and Picasso are buried.

In 1996 a French court made Claude Picasso the legal manager of Picasso’s works and properties, creating the Picasso Administration to protect the heirs interests and control de artist’s rights, licenses and authenticity certificates, among other legal questions. That didn’t settle the issues, though, as the heirs haven’t always agreed on the decisions that are taken.

For instance, Marina felt outraged when in 1998 Citroen was allowed to use the name Picasso for a line of cars (it had been Maya’s son’s idea). Marina wasn’t alone to complain: the director of the Musée Picasso of Paris and the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (a close friend of Picasso) publicly expressed their opinions of how inappropriate it was.

Also, while originally Maya was trusted by auctioneers to authenticate Picasso’s works, Claude began to authenticate too. Then both signatures started to be required, but they’ll often have opposite opinions, what made the procedures very complex. Then in 2012 Claude, Paloma, Marina and Bertrand unilaterally decided that only Claude’s signature would be valid. Maya declared that she “nearly died” when she learnt about it from a friend. However, even if she wasn’t officially part of the authentication process, her opinions were still regularly consulted and taken into account even if she wasn’t in the best terms with Claude. 

And more recently, in 2022 Marina Picasso and her son Florian have tried to sell a series of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) of a Picasso ceramic work, but they were stopped by the lawyers of the Picasso Administration. And just a few months before passing away, Claude Picasso transferred to his sister Paloma the society that controls the artists rights. If you want to learn more about the intricate legal battles of Picasso’s heirs, Vanity Fair has a very detailed report published in 2016.

I hope you enjoyed hearing about Pablo Picasso children!

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Pablo Picasso Biography

As a significant influence on 20th-century art, Pablo Picasso was an innovative artist who experimented and innovated during his 92-plus years on earth. He was not only a master painter but also a sculptor, printmaker, ceramics artist, etching artist and writer. His work matured from the naturalism of his childhood through Cubism, Surrealism and beyond, shaping the direction of modern and contemporary art through the decades. Picasso lived through two World Wars, sired four children, appeared in films and wrote poetry. He died in 1973.

Early Years: 1881-1900

Although he lived the majority of his adult years in France, Picasso was a Spaniard by birth. Hailing from the town of Málaga in Andalusia, Spain, he was the first-born of Don José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. He was raised as a Catholic, but in his later life would declare himself an atheist.

Pablo Picasso's father was an artist in his own right, earning a living painting birds and other game animals. He also taught art classes and curated the local museum. Don José Ruiz y Blasco began schooling his son in drawing and oil painting when the boy was seven, and he found the young Pablo to be an apt pupil.

Picasso attended the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, where his father taught, at 13 years of age. In 1897, Picasso began his studies at Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, which was Spain's top art academy at the time. Picasso attended only briefly, preferring to roam the art exhibits at the Prado, studying paintings of Rembrandt , Johannes Vermeer , El Greco , Francisco Goya , and Diego Veláquez .

During this nascent period of Picasso's life, he painted portraits, such as his sister Lola's First Communion . As the 19th century drew to a close, elements of Symbolism and his own interpretation of Modernism began to be apparent in his stylized landscapes.

Middle Years: 1900-1940

In 1900, Picasso first went to Paris, the center of the European art scene. He shared lodgings with Max Jacob, a poet and journalist who took the artist under his wing. The two lived in abject poverty, sometimes reduced to burning the artist's paintings to stay warm.

Before long, Picasso relocated to Madrid and lived there for the first part of 1901. He partnered with his friend Francisco Asis Soler on a literary magazine called "Young Art," illustrating articles and creating cartoons sympathetic to the poor. By the time the first issue came out, the developing artist had begun to sign his artworks "Picasso," rather than his customary "Pablo Ruiz y Picasso."

Blue Period

The Picasso art period known as the Blue Period extended from 1901 to 1904. During this time, the artist painted primarily in shades of blue, with occasional touches of accent color. For example, the famous 1903 artwork, The Old Guitarist , features a guitar in warmer brown tones amid the blue hues. Picasso's Blue Period works are often perceived as somber due to their subdued tones.

Historians attribute Picasso's Blue Period largely to the artist's apparent depression following a friend's suicide. Some of the recurring subjects in the Blue Period are blindness, poverty and the female nude.

Rose Period

The Rose Period lasted from 1904 through 1906. Shades of pink and rose imbued Picasso's art with a warmer, less melancholy air than his Blue Period paintings. Harlequins, clowns and circus folk are among the recurring subjects in these artworks. He painted one of his best-selling works during the Rose Period, Boy with a Pipe . Elements of primitivism in the Rose Period paintings reflect experimentation with the Picasso art style.

African Influence

During his African art and Primitivism period from 1907 to 1909, Picasso created one of his best-known and most controversial artworks, Les Damoiselles d'Avignon . Inspired by the angular African art he viewed in an exhibit at the Palais de Trocadero and by an African mask owned by Henri Matisse , Picasso's art reflected these influences during this period. Ironically, Matisse was among the most vocal denouncers of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" when Picasso first showed it to his inner circle.

Analytic Cubism

From 1907 to 1912, the artist worked with fellow painter Georges Braque in creating the beginnings of the Cubist movement in art. Their paintings utilize a palette of earth tones. The works depict deconstructed objects with complex geometric forms.

His romantic partner of seven years, Fernande Olivier, figured in many of the artist's Cubist works, including Head of a Woman, Fernande (1909). Historians believe she also appeared in "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Their relationship was tempestuous, and they separated for good in 1912.

Synthetic Cubism

This era of Picasso's life extended from 1912 to 1919. Picasso's works continued in the Cubist vein, but the artist introduced a new art form, collage, into some of his creations. He also incorporated the human form into many Cubist paintings, such as Girl with a Mandolin (1910) and Ma Jolie (1911-12). Although a number of artists he knew left Paris to fight in World War I, Picasso spent the war years in his studio.

He had already fallen in love with another woman by the time his relationship with Fernande Olivier ended. He and Eva Gouel, the subject of his 1911 painting, "Woman with a Guitar," were together until her untimely death from tuberculosis in 1915. Picasso then moved into a brief relationship with Gaby Depeyre Lespinesse that lasted only a year. In 1916-17, he briefly dated a 20-year-old actress, Paquerette, and Irene Lagut.

Soon thereafter, he met his first wife, Olga Khoklova, a ballet dancer from Russia, whom he married in 1918. They had a son together three years later. Although the artist and the ballerina became estranged soon thereafter, Picasso refused to grant Khoklova a divorce, since that meant he would have to give her half of his wealth. They remained married in name only until she died in 1955.

Neoclassicism and Surrealism

The Picasso art period extending from 1919 to 1929 featured a significant shift in style. In the wake of his first visit to Italy and the conclusion of World War I, the artist's paintings, such as the watercolor Peasants Sleeping (1919) reflected a restoration of order in art, and his neoclassical artworks offer a stark contrast to his Cubist paintings. However, as the French Surrealist Movement gained traction in the mid-1920s, Picasso began to reprise his penchant for Primitivism in such Surrealist-influenced paintings as Three Dancers (1925).

In 1927, the 46-year-old artist met Marie-Therese Walter, a 17-year-old girl from Spain. The two formed a relationship and Marie-Therese gave birth to Picasso's daughter Maya. They remained a couple until 1936, and she inspired the artist's "Vollard Suite," which consists of 100 neoclassical etchings completed in 1937. Picasso took up with artist and photographer Dora Maar in the late '30s.

During the 1930s, Picasso's works such as his well-known Guernica , a unique depiction of the Spanish Civil War, reflected the violence of war time. The menacing minotaur became a central symbol of his art, replacing the harlequin of his earlier years.

Later Years: 1940-1973

During World War II, Picasso remained in Paris under German occupation, enduring Gestapo harassment while he continued to create art. Some of the time, he wrote poetry, completing more than 300 works between 1939 and 1959. He also completed two plays, "Desire Caught by the Tail," and "The Four Little Girls."

After Paris was liberated in 1944, Picasso began a new relationship with the much younger art student Francoise Gilot. Together, they produced a son, Claude, in 1947, and a daughter, Paloma, in 1949. Their relationship was doomed like so many of Picasso's previous ones, however, due to his continual infidelities and abuse.

He focused on sculpture during this era, participating in an international exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1949. He subsequently created a commissioned sculpture known as the Chicago Picasso , which he donated to the U. S. city.

In 1961, at the age of 79, the artist married his second and last wife, 27-year-old Jacqueline Roque. She proved to be one of his career's greatest inspirations. Picasso produced more than 70 portraits of her during the final 17 years he was alive.

As his life neared its end, the artist experienced a flurry of creativity. The resulting artworks were a mixture of his previous styles and included colorful paintings and copper etchings. Art experts later recognized the beginnings of Neo-Expressionism in Picasso's final works.

Picasso's Influence on Art

As one of the greatest influences on the course of 20th-century art, Pablo Picasso often mixed various styles to create wholly new interpretations of what he saw. He was a driving force in the development of Cubism, and he elevated collage to the level of fine art.

With the courage and self-confidence unhindered by convention or fear of ostracism, Picasso followed his vision as it led him to fresh innovations in his craft. Similarly, his continual quest for passion in his many romantic liaisons throughout his life inspired him to create innumerable paintings, sculptures and etchings. Picasso is not just a man and his work. Picasso is always a legend, indeed almost a myth. In the public view he has long since been the personification of genius in modern art. Picasso is an idol, one of those rare creatures who act as crucibles in which the diverse and often chaotic phenomena of culture are focussed, who seem to body forth the artistic life of their age in one person.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

The old guitarist, girl before a mirror, three musicians, the weeping woman, the women of algiers, dora maar au chat, girl with mandolin, portrait of gertrude stein, family of saltimbanques, portrait of ambroise vollard, massacre in korea.

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Pablo Picasso summary

Explore the life and career of pablo picasso.

Pablo Picasso , (born Oct. 25, 1881, Málaga, Spain—died April 8, 1973, Mougins, France), Spanish-born French painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer. Trained by his father, a professor of drawing, he exhibited his first works at 13. After moving permanently to Paris in 1904, he replaced the predominantly blue tones of his so-called Blue Period (1901–04) with those of pottery and flesh in his Rose Period (1904–06). His first masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), was controversial for its violent treatment of the female body and the masklike faces derived from his study of African art. From 1909 to 1912 Picasso worked closely with Georges Braque —the only time Picasso ever worked with another painter in this way—and they developed what came to be known as Cubism . The artists presented a new kind of reality that broke away from Renaissance tradition, especially from the use of perspective and illusion. Neither Braque nor Picasso desired to move into the realm of total abstraction in their Cubist works, although they implicitly accepted inconsistencies such as different points of view, different axes, and different light sources in the same picture. By 1912 they had taken Cubism further by gluing paper and other materials onto their canvases. Between 1917 and 1924 Picasso designed stage sets for five ballets for Sergey Diaghilev ’s Ballets Russes. In the 1920s and ’30s, the Surrealists spurred him to explore new subject matter, particularly the image of the Minotaur. The Spanish Civil War inspired perhaps his greatest work, the enormous Guernica (1937), whose violent imagery condemned the useless destruction of life. After World War II he joined the Communist Party and devoted his time to sculpture, ceramics, and lithography as well as painting. In his late years he created variations on the works of earlier artists, the most famous being a series of 58 pictures based on Las Meninas of Diego Velázquez . For nearly 80 of his 91 years Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that contributed significantly to and paralleled the whole development of modern art in the 20th century.

10 Pablo Picasso Books for Children

Since Pablo Picasso is my son’s favorite artist, it’s no wonder we’ve enjoyed our share of Picasso books for children throughout the years. Today I’m sharing some of those reading choices so you can enjoy them with your kids.

(This post contains affiliate links; see disclosure for details.)

Most of these Picasso titles are familiar to us, but a few of these are on our wishlist. Old and new, I know they’ll be great additions to your homeschool shelves or a Pablo Picasso unit study you may be planning.

Here are ten children’s books to consider if you’re learning about Picasso with your kids.

Pablo Picasso Books for Children

One quick thing to note before jumping into the list is that all of the links below lead to Amazon. If you’re interested in supporting independent bookstores through your purchases, see this list on Bookshop.org . It’s got most of these titles, plus some extras not referenced here.

1. Meet the Artist: Pablo Picasso

I wasn’t expecting to come across a Picasso book with flaps to lift and cutouts to look through, but I found one in Meet the Artist: Pablo Picasso  from Patricia Geis. This is one that will keep your kids engaged and ready to learn more as they explore the changes in Picasso’s art during his lifetime.

2. Who Was Pablo Picasso?

Who Was Pablo Picasso?  is a great kid-friendly Picasso biography. At 112 pages, it’s a great source of information on Picasso’s formative years, his personal life, and his contributions to the world of art.

3. Pablo Picasso

Like the others from Mike Venezia’s series,  Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists: Pablo Picasso  is a fun overview of Picasso’s life and art. Also worth noting, it contains several full-color reproductions of Picasso’s work.

4. Picasso and the Girl with a Ponytail

I don’t exactly hide how much I love reading Anholt’s Artists Books for Children with my kiddos, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone to find  Picasso and the Girl with a Ponytail  on this list of Picasso books. This lovely picture book tells the story of Picasso and his neighbor Sylvette David and includes Anholt’s illustrations, as well as reproductions of some well-known pieces from Picasso.

Pablo Picasso & Bookshop.org

You can support local bookstores through your purchases by shopping this list on Bookshop.org. You’ll find most of these books about Picasso, plus some extras, waiting for you there.

5. Pablo Picasso: Breaking All the Rules

Pablo Picasso: Breaking All the Rules  from the Smart About Art series is a fun book-report style presentation of Picasso’s life and art. The information itself is good, but kids will particularly appreciate the illustrations and facts randomly found throughout the book.

6. Picasso’s Trousers

It’s not hard to understand why a biography named  Picasso’s Trousers  would grab your kiddo’s attention, right? This biography is especially good for young learners as it introduces Picasso’s work and styles. That said, the fun title isn’t necessarily reflected in the entire book. It’s definitely still a biography, but the pants come into the picture due to a quirky Picasso story shared toward the end of the book.

7. 100 Pablo Picassos

100 Pablo Picassos  is one of the more unique titles on this list of Picasso books and it’s one of the few titles that isn’t from a series. I especially love this one because the way it combines the details of Picasso’s personal background with his journey as an artist. If I were only going to buy one book on this list, this is the one I’d choose.

8. Painting with Picasso

Introduce your littlest learners to Pablo Picasso with Painting with Picasso.   This board book is perfect for less than gentle hands and combines simple and short text with some of Picasso’s paintings. It’s a great addition to your reading time!

9. Just Behave, Pablo Picasso!

“Just behave, Pablo.” It’s not hard to imagine that Picasso heard that phrase several times in both his childhood and adult life. After all, Picasso was known for breaking the rules about art.

Just Behave, Pablo Picasso!  is a picture book that captures the more rebellious side of Picasso as an artist — in a good way — and helps readers empathize with the artist as he followed his own ideas even when they weren’t popular.

10. The Boy Who Bit Picasso

Here’s another fun Picasso title for you: The Boy Who Bit Picasso . Aside from the fun name, this book stands out among the others because it was written by someone who knew and spent time with Pablo Picasso himself.

Just in case you can’t wait to find out for yourself, the author was indeed the boy who bit Picasso. And yes, Picasso bit him back. ;)

Looking for other reading ideas on the master artists? You may like these book lists:

• Children’s books about Georgia O’Keeffe
• Children’s books about Frida Kahlo
• Children’s books about Paul Cezanne
• Children’s books about Henri Matisse

2 thoughts on “10 Pablo Picasso Books for Children”

Thanks for your kind words about “100 Pablo Picassos,” and thanks for including it in your list. ?

Picasso was an amazing artist, and a great self promoter. My mom began homeschooling me in the 10th grade where I was able to get a better art education. While being homeschooled I did a report on this amazing artist. I wish I had had some of these books for more references. I really liked his cubist movement paintings. Great list of books. I will check them all out.. Mainly for myself… I suppose I should let my daughters glance at them too. Thanks!

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How Picasso’s Journey From Prodigy to Icon Revealed a Genius

Intense, provocative, disturbing, and captivating, the legendary artist led a life of restless brilliance.

It's the morning before Christie’s Impressionist and modern art evening sale in New York City, and suddenly, there it is.

Just past the auction house’s entrance at Rockefeller Center, Pablo Picasso’s vibrant geometric portrait “ Femme Accroupie (Jacqueline) ” jaunts down a hallway, carried by two art handlers dressed in black.

Painted in the south of France in October 1954, the canvas features Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s 27-year-old mistress, later to be his wife, her arms clasped around a patchwork skirt of green and purple triangles. The artist, then 72, painted “Femme Accroupie” in a single day, and it gushes with vigorous brushstrokes, thick pigment, rambunctious shapes, misaligned eyes, and an inverted nose. Golden light rings Jacqueline’s body. Even off the wall, the painting commands attention.

That evening, auctioneer Adrien Meyer will start the bidding at $12 million, and it will quickly surge upward as two Christie’s representatives duel in a telephone bidding war on behalf of their anonymous clients. His back straight, his head jutting forward like a jaguar eyeing a peccary, Meyer will pivot between the pair until one of them signals defeat. Finally, with a bang of his hammer, he’ll announce the winning price: $32.5 million.

Astounding but not surprising. Nearly half a century after his death, Picasso continues to bewitch, confuse, entice, and provoke. From his early days as an artist, Picasso shattered our most primal understanding of the world with his fractured faces and splintered perspectives. He worked voraciously, reinventing his style at a rapid pace—his blue and rose periods, the African period, cubism, surrealism—creating thousands of sculptures, drawings, copperplate etchings, ceramics, and paintings. Just as Albert Einstein envisioned gravitational ripples in the cosmos, Picasso saw undulations in the world we live in, long before we saw them ourselves.

Sitting on a chartreuse couch in his living room in Geneva, Picasso’s son Claude contemplates the impact of his father’s work. “He went on to destroy everything we were accustomed to,” he says, “and created a new vision for everyone.”

How does a person evolve from newborn to mastermind? How can a single soul redefine the way we see? Picasso the man was messy. He loved life at the circus and death at the bullfights. He could be both boisterous and silent, amorous and domineering. But from his beginning as a prodigy to his final years painting musketeers and matadors, Picasso seemed destined for artistic greatness, his journey to genius fixed as firmly as paint on canvas. All the elements were there: a family that cultivated his creative passion, intellectual curiosity and grit, clusters of peers who inspired him, and the good fortune to be born at a time when new ideas in science, literature, and music energized his work and the advent of mass media catapulted him to fame. Unlike creative geniuses who died young—Sylvia Plath at age 30, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at 35, Vincent van Gogh at 37—Picasso lived to the age of 91. The arc of his life was not only prodigious; it was long.

Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, Spain , a baby so lethargic he was feared stillborn. He was revitalized, Picasso said, by a puff of smoke from his uncle Salvador’s cigar. Landmarks of the artist’s childhood brim with vitality today in this sunlit Mediterranean city. A choir sings Man of La Mancha’s “Impossible Dream” in the Church of Santiago, where Picasso was baptized with holy water as a baby. Plaza de la Merced, where the artist etched his first drawings in the dust outside his home, bustles with tourists at cafés ordering, if they desire, a 12-euro ($15) hamburguesa Picasso. Pigeons light on the stones; the waters of the Alboran Sea lap at the shoreline; and Gypsies, like those who taught young Picasso to smoke a cigarette up his nostril and dance flamenco, continue to traverse Málaga’s streets.

Sipping tea out of a red cup in the courtyard of the Museo Picasso Málaga, the artist’s grandson Bernard Ruiz-Picasso reflects on how these early influences shaped Picasso’s art. Everything about this place is rich with history and sensuality, he says. Civilizations collided on the soil Picasso inhabited: Phoenician, Roman, Jewish, Moorish, Christian, and Spanish. Aromas filled the air. Gesturing to a nearby orange tree, Bernard says Picasso drew inspiration from the color of the fruits, from the violet flowers that drape Spain’s jacaranda trees, and from the beige and white stones of Málaga’s 11th-century Alcazaba, set into Gibralfaro hill, steps from the museum.

“He kept in his mind all those senses, all those images, all those smells and colors, which nourished and enriched his brain,” says Bernard, who established the museum—which opened in 2003—with his mother, Christine Ruiz-Picasso, fulfilling his grandfather’s wish.

Genius is almost always cultivated by parents and teachers who support and nurture the seeds of greatness. Picasso’s mother, María Picasso López, prayed for a son and revered her firstborn child. “His mother was gaga about him,” says Claude Picasso, who is the legal administrator of his father’s artistic estate. From the start, young Pablo communicated through art, drawing before he could speak. His first word was “piz,” short for lápiz , or pencil. Like the composer Mozart, Picasso had a father in the business, José Ruiz Blasco, who was a painter and his son’s first teacher. “He was the best student his father ever had,” Claude says. Picasso was still a child when his artistry began surpassing that of his father, who may have been “not only astonished but petrified by the talent of his son,” Bernard says.

Such a mix of awe and fear is not uncommon when it comes to prodigies. The Latin prodigium carries the connotation of something that’s unexpected but also “unwelcome and possibly dangerous,” says David Henry Feldman, a longtime researcher in the field. Prodigies perform at an advanced adult level before adolescence, playing Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano sonatas or doing complex math problems while some of their peers are still learning to jump rope. “It shakes your view of the world,” Feldman says.

Where does such early expertise come from? Prodigies are rare, making it difficult to gather robust sample sizes to research, but Ellen Winner, director of the Arts and Mind Lab at Boston College, has found several core features among those she has studied. Precocious artists have acute visual memories, show remarkable attention to detail, and are able to draw realistically and create an illusion of depth years before their peers. Winner believes these children have an innate talent propelled by a “rage to master”—a passion so intense they feel compelled to draw or paint whenever possible.

These characteristics mesh like a checklist with Picasso, who boasted about his exceptional artistry early in life. After seeing a children’s art exhibit in 1946, he famously said that he would never have been able to participate in such a show because “at the age of 12, I drew like Raphael.” Family members recalled that Picasso would draw for hours at a time as a child, sometimes taking requests—his cousin Maria’s favorite was a donkey—until he was too exhausted to continue. His earliest surviving works are believed to date to 1890, the year he turned nine, and include his oil painting “Le Picador,” which depicts a bullfighter on horseback.

Within a few years, Picasso was painting skilled portraits of family and friends. By the age of 16, his work had landed him a place in the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. At the Prado Museum he studied the Spanish masters he admired, including Diego Velázquez and El Greco. Art, Claude says, was “the only thing he was interested in. That’s the only thing he was. He was an artist through and through.”

The vast majority of prodigies don’t grow up to be geniuses, no matter how flawlessly they master a skill. Genius requires a game-changing personality, endowed with the courage and vision to transform a discipline. Picasso was a boy when Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, and other Postimpressionists liberated themselves from the luminous brushwork of Impressionism, adding defined forms and emotional intensity to their canvases.

When his turn came, Picasso charged forward with the intensity of a fighting bull. With his 1907 painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” the artist upended traditional composition, perspective, and aesthetic appeal. The canvas’s depiction of five naked women at a brothel—their faces distorted, their bodies jagged—alarmed even Picasso’s closest friends. But the painting would become the cornerstone of a radical art movement, cubism, and vault to the top of the list of the most important paintings of the 20th century. In that moment, “he brought down everything that anyone knew about art,” Claude says.

Picasso’s art was never meant to please. He avoided commissions, instead painting what he wanted and expecting people to be interested, his son says. So why do we find it so compelling? Science is providing interesting fodder here too. In the emerging field of neuroaesthetics, researchers are using brain images to better understand people’s responses to art—everything from Claude Monet’s water lilies to Mark Rothko’s rectangles.

In one study, Edward Vessel, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, scanned people’s brains as they ranked their reactions to more than a hundred images of artwork on a scale of one to four, with four being the most highly moving. Unsurprisingly, the participants’ visual system engaged every time they looked at a painting. But only the most moving artworks—the ones that were perceived to be especially beautiful or even striking or arresting—activated the “default mode network” of the brain, which allows us to focus inward and access our most personal thoughts and feelings.

Such a balance of outward viewing and inward contemplation is unusual, Vessel says. “It’s a unique brain state.”

This experience creates a special relationship between viewer and art, bringing the works alive. Neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, an avid art collector who owns two of Picasso’s Vollard Suite etchings, says images that challenge, like Picasso’s, recruit viewers into the creative process with the artist. The human brain is capable of taking incomplete clues and reconstructing fairly coherent images. “We have a tremendous ability to fill in details that are missing,” he says.

But how? In an ongoing study, Kandel, co-director of Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute, is taking brain scans as participants complete a series of exercises with figurative and abstract paintings by Rothko, Piet Mondrian, and other artists. Kandel’s Columbia collaborator, Daphna Shohamy, says they are eager to see whether abstract art elicits increased activity in the hippocampus, the brain’s storehouse for memories. This would suggest, at a biological level, that humans intuitively draw on their own experiences when viewing and processing complex art.

Long before brain science could corroborate it, Picasso seems to have understood this dynamic. “The picture,” he once said, “lives only through the man who is looking at it.”

The journey to greatness is never a solitary pursuit. Picasso found his first creative gurus at the Quatre Gats café in Barcelona, where he hobnobbed with more experienced Spanish artists, each one contributing to “the stimulus that fueled the early stages of Picasso’s rocket-like ascent,” writes Picasso’s longtime biographer and friend, John Richardson. In Paris, where he moved at the age of 22, Picasso immersed himself in another cluster of exuberant minds—writers Guillaume Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein and artists Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Georges Braque, the man who would become Picasso’s partner in cubism. The bande à Picasso, as his original bevy was known, stoked the artist’s creativity and competitive drive.

Still, Picasso’s singular behaviors and traits stood out. He was driven by an obsession and a voracious dedication to his art, a rage to master that never subsided. “It was almost neurological, something that forced him to be very active all the time,” says Diana Widmaier Picasso, an art historian and the granddaughter of Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter, one of Picasso’s most radiant muses, with whom he had a secretive affair.

The artist found promise in everything, etching an owl or a goat onto a stone from the sea. He formed the face of a sculpted baboon using two of his son’s toy cars, and crafted his famous “Bull’s Head” out of a bicycle seat and rusty handlebars plucked out of a junk pile. Picasso produced incessantly—paintings, sculpture, ceramics, even jewelry. “He had the ability to renew himself constantly,” Diana says. “He was so prolific, it’s almost disarming.” Picasso said he didn’t know where his creative bursts came from, but they rampaged through his head, discrete parts becoming whole through his hands and his paintbrushes.

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The artist’s sharp and colossal memory served as a storehouse for inspiration. “He was a sponge,” says Emilie Bouvard, a curator at the Musée Picasso Paris. In her office, not far from the bustle of visitors, I ask Bouvard to pick the quality that best exemplifies Picasso’s prowess. “In my opinion, it’s assemblage,” she says, the artist’s ability to sift through layered memories—a conversation with a poet, the haunting expressions in an El Greco painting, the medley of sensations from Málaga, a pot of paint in his studio. As she reflects, Bouvard calls up the French expression faire feu de tout bois (to make fire of all wood). “That’s the genius of Picasso,” she says.

Talent, nurturing, opportunity, personality: Picasso had it all. He was also lucky. The artist came of age when photography overturned the focus on traditional realism in paintings. The art world was primed for rule breaking and disruption, says András Szántó, a sociologist of art in New York City, and the media was newly equipped to celebrate it. Picasso, well aware of his stature, was masterful at branding his image. “He was so aware of his talent,” says Diana’s brother and Picasso’s grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso. “He understood that he would be important in the future.”

Early on, the artist shed his father’s name, Ruiz, and adopted his mother’s more memorable Picasso. He began dating his paintings so they could one day be assembled in chronological order. He invited photographers to capture him posing with bravado in front of his canvases, dancing bare-chested with his lover, and playing with his children on the beach. By 1939 Picasso had vaulted onto the cover of Time magazine, which deemed him “Art’s Acrobat.” In 1968, five years before he died, Life magazine dedicated a 134-page double issue to him. “He was able to layer his biography over these enormous inflection points in our culture,” Szántó says. “He happened to play it really well.”

The legacy of genius is a sweeping affair with eminence and acclaim, often tied to personal anguish. The traits that promoted Picasso’s creations—his infatuation with his work and his rule breaking—led to praise and even cultlike worship. Until Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” sold for more than $450 million last year, Picasso’s $179.4 million “Les Femmes d’Alger” was the most expensive painting ever auctioned. Picasso exhibits continue to draw record-breaking crowds: The spotlight now is on a blockbuster exhibition in London called “Picasso 1932—Love, Fame, Tragedy.” His works inspire people as disparate as artist Allison Zuckerman, who made her debut at Art Basel in Miami Beach in December, and Wang Zhongjun, a Chinese media mogul who periodically paints with a cigar clamped between his teeth and the Picasso he purchased in 2015, “Femme au Chignon dans un Fauteuil,” set up nearby.

These same qualities, however, also tainted Picasso’s relationships, sometimes to the point of ruin. Fearful of illness and death, he cycled through women, many of them decades younger than he, perhaps in part to defy the odds of growing old. He craved women, and his charisma attracted them. Picasso had “a radiance, an inner fire,” wrote Fernande Olivier, who lived with him from 1905 to 1912 in Paris, “and I couldn’t resist this magnetism.”

But he could be jealous and misogynistic, displaying behaviors that are now fueling a public debate about whether an artist’s conduct should affect the perception of his art. “Throughout his life there was a thing of women being sacrificed to feed his art,” biographer Richardson once said. Françoise Gilot, a painter in her own right and the mother of Claude and his sister, Paloma, met Picasso in a Paris café in 1943 when she was 21 and he was 61. In a memoir, she recounted Picasso holding a cigarette against her cheek and threatening to throw her over the Pont Neuf into the Seine River. His most lasting love was his art. Tragedies piled up after the artist’s death with the suicides of Picasso’s widow—Jacqueline—his paramour Marie-Thérèse, and his grandson Pablito.

Picasso’s surviving children and grandchildren have complex feelings about him.

Marina Picasso, his son Paulo’s daughter, has issued the harshest judgment. “His brilliant oeuvre demanded human sacrifices,” she wrote in her 2001 memoir. “He drove everyone who got near him to despair and engulfed them.”

But others, including Marina’s half-brother Bernard, who was 14 when Picasso died, and their younger cousins Olivier and Diana, who never knew him, have processed their grandfather’s life differently. While acknowledging the trauma, they also express gratitude for Picasso’s work and the fortune he left behind, which has not only deeply influenced the direction of their lives but also provided financial freedom. Olivier has co-produced two documentaries and written two books about his grandfather. Diana, who feels an obligation to work with the tenacity of her grandfather, is completing a comprehensive catalog of Picasso’s sculptures. And besides overseeing the Museo Picasso Málaga, Bernard and his wife, Almine Rech-Picasso, built an art foundation around his grandfather’s work. “Life is full of drama. We are not the only ones,” Bernard tells me. “I’m deeply grateful for what Picasso gave me.”

In the end, Picasso’s journey from prodigy to legacy is a story of ultimate conquest.

“He left few corners untouched and unturned,” says Claude, as he sits surrounded by his father’s and his mother’s paintings in his home, midday sun streaming in. Still, when I ask how he explains his father’s genius, he answers with the most uncomplicated reply: “How do I explain it? I don’t explain it,” he says. “I just understood it. It was obvious to me as a tiny child.”

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Pablo Picasso Biography for Kids

Hola, my name is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruiz y Picasso, but you can call me Picasso.

I am the most important artist of the 20 th century. I was born in Malaga, Spain in 1881.

When I was a child, my mother said to me, “If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll end up as the pope.” Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

My father, who was also a painter and art teacher, taught me to draw and paint, and I soon became a better artist than he!

I never liked school much, because I resented being told what to do by my teachers and so I was often disobedient. I didn’t mind that they sent me to the ‘calaboose,’ a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on. I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly … I could have stayed there forever, drawing without stopping.

I can paint very realistically as I did in my teens,…

…and I showed my first paintings at a junk shop when I was 13 years old and even sold a few.

But I like to experiment with materials and styles, and I am very creative and never complacent. I paint or draw every day! You might say I am obsessed with my art.

When I was 20, my close friend, Casagemas, took his own life, I became very sad.

I began to paint in shades of blue, and the people in my paintings of this time often look sad and have an elongated style like that of El Greco, the famous Greek painter, like in my painting The Tragedy…

…or The Old Blind Guitarist . This is called my Blue Period now.

By 1904, when I was 23, I had moved to Paris away from my native Spain, and I fell in love.

My art again reflected my mood – now I was happy, so my paintings had rose and pink colors, so people called this my Rose Period. It was also my Circus Period, for I enjoyed painting circus people and harlequins.

In my painting Family of Saltimbanques , you can even see that I included myself as a harlequin in the painting.

1n 1907, my friend, Georges Braque, and I began experimenting with perspective and challenging the constraints of perspective that had been accepted since the Renaissance. We wanted to try to include many different angles and views of an object in one painting. So we made blocks of different views and started a new style of art called Cubism. My painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon) was my first big work in the style of Cubism, and while many found shocking and rejected the angular and jarring view which lacks depth, this pushed my work and art into a new abstract era for which I am known.

I also invented Collage, including bits of newspaper or rope or other real objects in the paintings.

I enjoyed sculpture as well, again making it my own unique style by taking ordinary objects and creating something from them. I once took a bicycle seat and handlebars to create a bull!

During World War I, I again changed my style of painting to return to realistic paintings. This was my Classical Period.

Never content with one style, though, I soon began to experiment with depicting paintings based on Freud’s studies on the power of the subconscious mind. This art movement was called Surrealism.

One of my famous paintings is from this time of Surrealism and is called Guernica after a Spanish city that the Nazis bombed in 1936 during the Spanish civil war. I depict the horrors of war in a disjointed fashion using only white, black and grey. The Nazis were angry at me for creating the painting Guernica and came to my door. “Did you do this?” one asked me. “No,” I replied, “You did.” They created the violence; I only painted it.

While my art is shocking and disturbing to many and I am often asked what it means, I don’t want people to try to understand art. Why spoil the magic of it? I do not think when I paint but let my mind and feelings run free. I live my own way, and my art keeps me alive!

Here’s what you should remember about me:  I am Pablo Picasso . I lived from 1881  to 1973 . I am a known for my creative experimentation with many styles in especially abstract art. I am known also for Cubism, Collage and Surrealism .

Watch the video about me too!

Investigate the life and art works of Pablo Picasso in this artist unit study!

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10 Reasons to Study Art and the Great Artists

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